getting wasted in pennsylvania

I have often found myself explaining the fairly weird way that buying alcohol
works in Pennsylvania. I thought I'd share the madness.

The state of Pennsylvania has a monopoly on the sale of wine and spirits. If
you want to buy a bottle of whisky, you have to go to one of the "Wine and
Spirits" stores run by the Liquor Contorl Board.
We Pennsylvanias call them "state stores." At the state store, you can buy
wine and hard liquor, but not beer or, well, anything else. If you want to
make lousy bourbon sours, you'll need to get bourbon from the state store and
sour mix from the grocery.

Does anyone else think it's funny that the welcome message on the LCB website
is blurry?

Vinyards can sell their own wine, either at the vinyard or at a dedicated
store.

If you want beer, you have a few choices. You can go to a place that serves
beer with food. The common cases are delis and pizzarias. If you can buy a
sandwich and a beer, then it's legal to buy a bottle or a six pack to go.
Actually, you can buy two six packs, but not more. In practice, you can buy
as much as you want by making several trips, but you won't want to, because
it's expensive. You can pay as much as $10 for a six pack of decent beer.

If you want to buy beer in quantity, you need to go to a beverage distributor.
These are usually like warehouses, with lots of beer and soda. Potato chips
and beef jerky and sometimes cigars are often on hand. A case of decent beer
will run you between $25 and $35. I saw a case of Delirium Tremens on the
shelf last night for $83.

Beverage distributors that sell beer are closed on Sundays, as are state
stores, so if you want a drink on Sunday you'll have to go to a restaurant.

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to
use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

Beverage distributors that sell beer are closed on Sundays, as are state stores, so if you want a drink on Sunday you'll have to go to a restaurant.

That's not true anymore. Starting a couple of years ago, some State Stores started being open on Sundays from noon to 5. My local store in Bryn Mawr was one of the first to open on Sundays. It also got one of those fancy temperature-controlled rooms for the expensive wines. (I'm sure it's purely a coincidence that the head of the PLCB at the time was a B

Thanks for the corrections. A few other people had pointed this out, too. I hadn't realized that things had relaxed. I'm going to need to see if any local beer places are open Sunday. The one I like, sadly, is not.